Olumayowa CO-3

On Monday May 28th, I decided to observe another one of Vicky Ledbetter's classes, this time her speaking class. I last checked out her reading class and liked how patient she was with students so I wanted to see her in an environment where the students could be even more talkative and she would be even willing to respond.The class turned out to have pretty much the same students that I knew from the reading class with the addition of one new girl from Burkina Faso. 

I was lucky enough to visit the class on the day that they were reviewing foods so I was really attentive because I was curious about the students' opinion about many American foods. We started the class with a deck of cards with pictures of foods that they all had to identify; I felt like this was an awesome strategy because it was a quick focusing activity that could go into many different directions, for example calling out the names of the food on the cards helped her to identify lots of pronunciation issues. As this is a foundations class, she only paid enough detail to pronunciation to make the students say the words comprehensibly.

As I assumed, everyone wanted to say something in this class. The topic easily digressed with small things like the difference between "soup", "soap" and "sap" but she knew how to pull them right back on track. When the class started going off track too often, Vicky used it to her advantage by starting a system in which we categorized all the foods into "Healthy" and "Unhealthy". This was a forum in which the students could express their opinions so everybody wanted to speak about why they think microwaves are bad and why chicken is good, even Michelle- the student least comfortable with speaking- wanted to say something. This class size (about 7 students) is so awesome, it really felt like we were a group of friends hanging out around a table.

The main activity was a worksheet that required us to get into pairs with questionnaires about food that had questions like "What foods do you eat often?", we had to ask each other these and write down the results. I tried to be enthusiastic about it but this was a really boring activity, I had to beg my partner Ahmad to not leave class to go home because he simply wasn't interested. I felt like the work should have been collected so that students would have some incentive to finish it, I was noticing that other groups weren't doing too well themselves. 

Altogether I really enjoyed shadowing this class, largely because its a foundations class and I love how enthusiastic they are about new material. I feel like new English students are a nice way to check how effective my lessons/teaching techniques will be for the more advanced ones. Also, in watching how Vicky teaches, I have a good idea of how to be patient in these classes where I might have to answer a lot of questions and explain a lot of concepts.